Pros and Cons of Measuring Web Traffic

It might seem like the height of 1950's old-media arrogance to argue that too much information about the habits and preferences of readers threatens quality journalism. "The customer is king" is a time-honored mantra of business-world public-relations wizards, even if most American shoppers do not feel like royalty. With the notion that readers should pay for news as outmoded as wedding dowries, a decision to cater to the expectations of the audience would appear to be the only route to journalistic survival.

But a recent three-year stint as the Washington bureau chief for Salon.com left me brooding about the unanticipated side effects of this kind of reader sovereignty on the web. Salon boasted an admirable commitment to investigative reporting and probably devoted as high a percentage of its gross revenues to aggressively covering the 2008 presidential campaign as any publication in America, with the exception of Politico. As the rare stand-alone news Web site that is a publicly traded corporation, Salon's precarious economic condition has been well-documented. But despite a tight editorial budget, its writers and editors aspired to journalistic excellence.

So what was the problem? Part of it was ideological. Salon has always been a left-of-center magazine reflecting its roots in San Francisco. But it also received constant feedback from the marketplace to become shriller. As an early adapter of the practice of allowing readers to post their own letters on the site, Salon inadvertently created its own left-wing shock troops who castigated any writer who deviated from the simplistic "Bush is a war criminal" and "all Republicans are evil" party line. Salon's editors gamely tried various schemes to elevate the tenor of the letters threads. But this chorus of ideological invective had a pernicious effect on all but the most thick-skinned writers.

The larger difficulty—and one not stressed enough in the discussions of Internet journalism—is the tyranny that comes from real-time readership numbers. The dark side of reader power is not unique to Salon or to political Web sites. It casts a shadow not only on Internet-based publications, but also raises questions about the viability of proposed economic models like micro-payments to sustain quality newspapers.

I came to Salon with three decades experience in print journalism. Like almost all newspaper reporters and magazine writers, I had spent my career bathed in the narcissistic fantasy that every person who subscribed to a publication for which I worked eagerly devoured every word that I wrote. I blithely assumed that my personal audience was the circulation times three for pass-along readers.

Granted it was a fool's paradise. But never once in my career was I lectured about readership numbers. If my editors had shared focus-group or polling information with me, the data would have been vague and out-of-date. There was no way to determine how many readers skipped immediately to the sports section after yawning through the first paragraph of my latest newspaper column.

But Salon—like every major publication on the web—receives real-time data about how many computer users have a particular article on their screens at that moment. In theory, this rich bounty of information should make it easier for an online publication to satisfy its readership. In reality, the message from readers was that they craved what they already knew and demanded constant reinforcement of their pre-existing attitudes. Economic survival depended on higher traffic, so there was a built-in incentive to billboard articles that were the most popular with readers.

Most well-designed online publications (Salon, Slate, The Huffington Post) have layouts that highlight five, six or maybe eight stories at a time. Since many readers refuse to scroll down an entire web page searching for a story that intrigues them, the prime real estate on an online publication's home page is more valuable than a newspaper front page or a magazine cover. (A quasi-invisible story is not apt to attract links and that lessens the odds that it will pop up on a search engine).

What this meant in practice at Salon was that an article might have as few as six hours to prove itself with readers before it was yanked out of a position of prominence. Needless to say, the shelf life of an article that grappled with a campaign issue like health care was about equal to butter in an un-refrigerated dairy case. Rants about Fox News or Sarah Palin often received many times the readership of investigative articles on the Iraq war or densely reported political pieces about swing voters in Indiana. During September 2008—the second most heavily trafficked month in Salon's history—the dozen leading stories in terms of readership included: "The Sarah Palin pity party," "What's the different between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick," "The pastor who clashed with Palin" and "Sarah Palin's wasteful ways."

As a result, Salon's internal culture and stray comments by editors worked to discourage writing about important topics (campaign-issue analysis, non-war-related foreign news) because they invariably earned lower readership numbers. In a newspaper, a great lead anecdote might lure readers into an article on a non-sexy topic. But on the web, all the salesmanship has to be provided by the headline. Clever headline writing is rarely an option online, since heads and decks have to be written to fit the irony-free sensibilities of search-engine algorithms.

Of course, this obsession with traffic figures does not mean that all news Web sites will turn their coverage into a paparazzi patrol on the lookout for the latest about Britney, Lindsay and Paris. What I do fear is that worship of real-time readership numbers will send online journalism to the frivolous fringes of serious topics. Emotion invariably trumps substance. You can always gin up more traffic sniping about what Chris Matthews just said about Tim Geithner than by discussing the details of the Treasury Department's latest bank rescue plan.

My experience at Salon has whetted my appetite for online journalism. I recognize that we are in the midst of a technological transition akin to the one that was launched when a German printer named Gutenberg threw his first book party. But what Internet journalism requires are self-confident editors (and owners) who can resist the blandishments of quick-react readership statistics and allow laudable stories time to build their own audience. Otherwise, we will all—reporters and readers alike—find ourselves stuck in heavy traffic with nothing but fluff to read.

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